As the world’s first indoor sports venue certified LEED Platinum, the Golden 1 Center is the brand new home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, featuring seven sections of LiveWall® green walls. Designed by AECOM to be different from a typical sports arena unconnected from its surroundings and lifeless except on game days, the Golden 1 Center celebrates Sacramento’s climate and lifestyle. Its innovative indoor-outdoor design re-imagines how an arena can relate to the streetscapes and neighborhoods around it. Reflecting the region and connecting to the city, the living walls are a prominent feature of Golden 1 Center.

The inspired idea was to make the building look as if it rests on the green walls, rooting the arena in the landscape and extending it from the new plaza up to the walls of the arena itself. The design redefines how an arena’s footprint affects its environment and community and the green walls were a natural outgrowth of the King’s commitment to sustainability. As visitors walk into the arena, they see living bands of green that change with different sections displaying different plants based on the varying patterns of sun and shade around the building. Completed in September 2016, the seven sections of the Golden 1 Center green wall vary in dimensions and total 4,800 square feet and include 2,700 LiveWall modular planters in a custom platinum color. With a slope of about 10 degrees, they feature 18 different types of plants and 5,400 plants in total, watered with LiveWall Outdoor – Automatic Irrigation. All flowering plants bloom in shades of purple, the Kings’ signature color. Publicly accessible, the green walls are visible from multiple vantage points around the arena. Whether installed indoors or outdoors, green walls are visually appealing and inviting, inspiring and healthful, and beneficial to the environment, and the green walls at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento enliven the exterior of the world’s greenest indoor sports and entertainment arena.

Year: 2016Owner: City of SacramentoLocation: Sacramento, CA, USABuilding Type: CommercialType: Living WallSystem: Single Source ProviderSize: 4800 sq.ft.Slope: 10 degreesAccess: Accessible, Open to Public